Film work

I haven't been doing much exciting, but I have been doing much.

For the short film, I've been calling local merchants and asking them to donate merchandise for use as props. We're willing to put their goods on screen, pretty much front and center if they give them to us for free. For example, we want some cool maple syrup bottles from an Old Montreal store. The bottles contribute to the story, as the film's all about Canadianness, but I still can't help thinking of last fall's brouhaha hiccup over NBC's product placement. I've never had too big a problem with product placement.

The short is based on a chapter of a book, which by coincidence has a second edition coming out in June. We want to feature the book in the short, but the new edition is not yet available, so I'm creating mock copies of the second edition by using covers to cover a third book. The first and second edition are different sizes, so I can't just re-cover the first edition with the second cover. The publisher doesn't want me to disfigure the book inside, which made it a difficult technological problem. I decided on tabs of two-sided tape, which can be removed without damaging the paper.

Monday, I have to drive around town setting up meals for crew and printing out posters to be used on camera. Interesting fact: no matter what time of day it is, the meal served during shooting is called lunch.

My most interesting task is rigging a cell phone to fall apart upon a smash. The inside is held together with Allen screws of a size between 1/64" and 0.05", and I don't have the proper size Allen key. It might be metric. I have to drill out the screws, then reassemble the phone so that it's held together with dots of white glue. That should retain the phone's integrity when handle normally yet release when smashed.

We film this week, Thursday through Sunday.